Ethical Technology

One of the great failures of the progressive environmental movement, of which I have been a lifelong participant, is the rejection of modern technology. The assumption all along has been that technology is the problem and a low tech, low impact life is the only solution to modern woes. Set aside the philosophical similarities between this vision and fundamentalist religion for now and just consider the main points of this argument. Technology is always a double edged sword. Technology or toolmaking is also the distinguishing characteristic of the human species. Take away the impetus to toolmaking and all the rest of civilization would never have come into existence. For the sake of argument, I assume most humans prefer some degree of civilization to barbarism. Despite idyllic claims of the uninformed, life in ancient times was nasty, brutish and short for most. No one declines emergency medicine after a car accident, for example.

The radical leftist environmental position is that the more powerful the technology, the greater the possible good and harm. There is no dispute here. So if we are able to achieve an equivalent good with a less powerful technology, that would be the clear solution to societal ills. As an example, if natural medicine is as effective as modern medicine, than it leaves a lighter footprint and should be widely adopted. Or if traditional farming techniques provide enough quality affordable food to feed the world, then why use chemicals. The argument has been the these developments serve only to enrich the already rich and actually decrease quality of life for most. However, these supposed truisms are both false. Neither traditional medicine nor traditional farming are sufficient in and of themselves to achieve the stated goals. Mounting evidence suggests that integrated methods in both medicine and agriculture achieve the best outcomes.

Having been in natural medicine for 20 years, I can state unequivocally that it is quite effective for the relief of many symptoms and the lessening of the risk for many illnesses. But once a person becomes chronically ill with widespread organic changes in their tissues, there is steep decline in effectiveness. Modern medicine is more effective at addressing many of the killer changes that occur in this process, such as hypertension. But this often comes with significant side effects. Research in China and the consensus of most experienced Chinese herbalists is that a combination of low dose drugs combined with natural medicine typically achieves the same or better benefits as modern medicine with little or no toxicity. Drug side effects are dose dependent and the soundest solution is to develop methods towards this end. To insist on using natural medicine alone for philosophical reasons flies in the face of evidence based reason. The situation is analogous in farming where Integrated Pest Management has proven far more effective than organics in producing safe, abundant and cheap food.

Several factors have blinded the progressive environmental movement to the importance of developing high tech solutions to societal problems. One is a lack of patience. When the major issues I speak of hit the public radar, they were not embraced by either academia or business. As a result, the progress in the development of ethical technology has been slow. In response to this resistance, much of the environmental movement adopted a back to the land mentality. Instead of going into engineering and agribusiness and computer science, progressive characterized these things as the bane of civilization and instead looked backwards in time for solutions. The problem with this approach is that evolution proceeds on a cultural level. Solutions to societal problems are either adaptive or they are not. Ideas arise and if they lead to greater societal fitness, they take root. While monied interests certainly will try and block change that hurts their bottom line, adaptive responses do self-perpetuate. 20 years ago, no doctor considered nutrition a major factor in chronic illness. Today, typical medical recommendations for healthy living sound just like advice from a naturopath. It may have taken 20 years and this may be unacceptable to those who knew the truth long ago, but patience is a virtue and consciousness doesn't change overnight.

Another important and overlooked piece of the puzzle is the acceleration of technology. There is ample evidence that technological change has had a steadily accelerating rate of change for pretty much all of human history. This has become more and more evident over time as the rate of change will lead to more and more dramatic differences. The classic example is the compound interest on a penny, which if doubled every day for a month, results in 5 million dollars in 30 days. Moore's law which decribes the rate of increasing miniaturization and processing speed of computer chips was formulated in the 60's. Moore predicted that these things would double every 18-24 months. He has never been proved wrong yet. But for most of that time, the doubling did not achieve much of significance. If it takes a month to do a calculation, 15 days is still a long time. But now we are on the brink of computing faster than and as intricate as the human brain in a product no larger than human brain.

Most importantly, this technological change seems to advance even when one or more major world societies is mired in a dark age. The Chinese invented gunpowder and the printing press during an era when the west did little of anything significant in technology. The west similarly made advances in modern times while China languished. And now Asia proceeds full steam ahead while the west debates supposed ethical issues such as when is a cell cluster a person. So the whole time the progressive environmentalists preached their romantic low tech vision, technology advanced at its own pace. And therein lies the crux of the matter. If technology will advance anyway and technology is a double-edged sword, then it is absolutely vital that those who embrace environmental ethics also engage in the development of ethical uses for technology. By completely abdicating this task to nameless faceless corporations during the past 4 decades since Carsons's Silent Spring was first published, we have really made our own beds. Technology will continue to advance at mind boggling rates in the next 2 decades. Progressives must right in the thick of things or we will see our worst nightmares come true. If the sword does swing both ways and it is immensely powerful then it stands to reason that this power can be used for great good as easily as great evil. It is time to come down from our high horses and work to create this inevitable future world according to our values. It always comes down to guns or butter. Not whether technology advances, but in how it is used. Merely ranting from the sidelines has done little but push the agenda fully into the control of the military and big business. But like the great democratizing forced of the internet, which also sprang from the loins of these beasts, it is ours for the taking if we so choose.

Either Way

It occurs to me that it might not be clear that I don't really care which version of the future arrives. I prefer whatever version gives the most health at the least cost. But there's two parts there. MOST health and LEAST cost. I lean towards most health rather than least cost and I think the preponderance of the evidence suggests a system that combines the most cutting edge high tech therapies with safe, natural holistic therapies of old is the ideal. It might not be the cheapest, but its worth paying for something if it has value. Freedom from much of the suffering of old age would be worth our current costs to most folks and it can probably be had for even cheaper. (As I write, congress is preparing to override the shrub's executive order banning the development of new stem cell lines from discarded embryos. The main reason is that so much progress has been made in other countries in the last three years, there is a real
concern about the brain drain fromm America).

Basically, there are a few possible scenarios. After much consdieration and relfection over the past two decades, I have come to the conclusion that one version of a high tech future one is most desirable. Others apparently feel otherwise. If anyone has evidence that anything short of a technological advance will reverse our fate, please share. Anything else is just a bandaid.

1. Scenario one is the current path of destruction. If there are no major advances in technology to clean up the environment and improve medicine, etc., we will exceed our carrying capacity and a dark age will ensue. There would be a high chance of a terrorist attack of a nuclear or biochemical nature as societies degenerated and tribalism increased. I may or may not survive this era unscathed, but at some point (about 40-60 years) I will get sick and die and then my flesh will be eaten by worms.

2. Another would be choosing to live simply and not acquire new gadgets and keep pace with advancement in technology that save time, energy, etc. Ride your bicycle everywhere. Eat only organics, etc. Avoid synthetic anything. This doesn't usually go to the extreme of giving up all technology for most advocates. But the idea is that if we all left a light footprint on the earth, the rate of pollution would slow and reverse over the centuries. Assuming enough people signed on, most ecologists think its too late for measures such as this to have enough effect. And most folks will not sign on. Most folks are still waiting to catch up with us and have no inclination to step lightly along the way. This includes 3 billion asians and 2 billion africans. But lets say they all go organic. Same ending as number 1 for me. Perhaps the world is a better place after I die. People might get along better in such a cooperative utopia and there would be rewards in quality of life as a result. But we might also forestall the development of technologies that could actually solve some of these problems while the inevitable bears down on us anyway. We will be able to console ourselves in our relationships and our faith and our hope of eternal life of the spirit. But some might call that the opiate of the masses.

3. Something that definitely is not going to happen short of some uncontrollable catastrophe is a loss of all modern technology and being plunged back into some pretech paradise of the imagination. But, even so..... same ending as numbers 1 and 2 for me. My guess is that things would get nasty pretty quick in such a world. Pure darwinian thuggery. Short and brutish for most. Now if all humans were killed, things would sort themselves out in a few thousand years, but that would certainly be no fun at all for me.

4. Some major advance in technology that allows us to fix the excesses of 20th century technology. This will be a double-edged sword. Maybe we will destroy the world as a result, but that seems inevitable under the first two scenarios and pretty much a done deal under number 3. Or we will emerge into a new world still wrestling with lots of old problems (racism, sexism, class, religion), just no longer plagued with some of the old ones. Just as very few living physicians have ever helplessly watched a tetanus patient die before their eyes, perhaps the same will be true of cancer. It was unimaginable to cure tetanus and rabies and plague and leprosy once upon a time, so we cannot really make any safe bets about the future of medicine. And the mapping of the human genome really has changed everything. I might get to a live very long time in this world or get bored and kill myself.
Either way....

New Technology Ends Many Debates

In the mid eighties when I was first immersing myself in new age culture and alternative medicine, it seemed to me that science was not progressing much anymore. And that it was actually leading us astray. A typical view formed in many bastions of liberal academia. However, technology has often ended many debates.

A friend shared an example of this philosophy titled: Decolonizing The Revolutionary Imagination: Values Crisis, the Politics of Reality, and Why There's Going to Be a Common-Sense Revolution in This Generation

I am not nearly so pessimistic. I think a lot of the problems described in this article will be altered irrevocably and positively by modern technology. Which ironically is somewhat beholden to the military and corporations for its continued development. I am going to
assume for the sake of argument that most folks reading this would prefer not to spend their days ploughing fields. So it comes down to whether the modern world we want can be achieved without the consequent harm that seems to accompany its growth. While technology is a double-edged sword, I think each succeeding phase of technology has answered that question yes over and over again. The apparent destructiveness of technology is seen when limiting oneself to a short term perspective. But since the overall trend in technology throughout all of human history seems to be towards more democracy, less servitude and toil, the question is not whether to advance, but rather how to do it ethically and avoid the short term pain that has usually accompanied this growth.

If it were not for the internet, the all news, media and entertaintainment would be owned and filtered through 5 large corporations. That was their plan for many years and they never saw the internet coming. All the while, there were those who wrote with dread of the upcoming era when we would all be brainwashed by right wing demagogues. Now ain't that just a pipe dream anymore? Personal technology liberated desktop publishers in the 80's and webmaster in the 90s. The internet, a product of the US defense department, is beyond governmental control and thus there will never be a time when information on this planet can be completely controlled ever again.

How about fossil fuels, a major arena for corrupt money, intrigue, war and pollution. It may not be soon enough for some of you, but their use will decline dramatically over the next 20 years with fuel cells, hybrids, solar, wind, hydrogen and biodiesel. All of this will initially be quite bound up with the acquisition of more and more money by the already rich. With that point, I completely agree with the author of the article above. But if ultimately they can't control the media and also can't control energy, how will they continue to get your money? By scaring you into funding an endless war, perhaps. But I digress.

If the information we need for health and other things is freely available and we live in a clean environment devoid of fossil fuel emissions, then we are still left with at least one pressing basic issue. How do we supply the needs of housing and food? In other words, we still need to earn a living. It is in the workplace where we are most shackled to powerful employers. However there is a exponentially growing trend in miniaturization and increased computing speed that already allows the processing of data and even the production of goods on demand in a way not possible before.

One can be a software company with a laptop and internet connection. CDs can be burned by the hundreds in small countertop devices. One can have a internet broadcast station or professional quality video editing studio for few thousand dollars instead of a few hundred
thousand. Many things now done in factories in huge volumes for economies of scale will be able to be done using table top appliances to meet smaller markets and on demand orders. This new frontier of personal technology may thwart the last bastion of corporate dominance as more and more small companies and individuals unexpectedly replace large corporations as the dominant economic force. This is not the plan, of course, but it keeps seeming to play out that way. The latest of these powerful democratic trends has been labeled Web 2.0.

And what will be the end result of all this? It may be that we will finally emerge in the world only a technological utopia can yield, one of good health, satisfying work, little violent crime, global peace and prosperity. This world certainly never existed in the past (no matter what bong driven ecofantasies one might harbor) and as long as the model of scarce resources dominates economic thinking, it will never exist in the future. But the difference is that in the past the resources were indeed scarce. The ones we speak of today are as unlimited as the life of the earth and the human race: wind, sun and information. It is estimated that information already dominates the value of most major production goods like computers and cars. The actual value of the raw materials in these goods is actually quite small in comparison.

With such an abundance of wealth and little need to fight over physical things, is it possible that the craven drive to dominate will disappear? Or perhaps will it be that technology will so liberate the masses on some fundamental level that the formerly rich and powerful will no longer have the evolutionary niche they once enjoyed. What if you had a machine that turned your garbage into furniture or clothing, for example. Something that will be dramatically altered by nanotechnology, for example, is the recycling of all materials at the molecular level into other things. Waste will really be a thing of the past. Every ounce of pollution we have ever created could be nontoxically "uncreated". Ethical technology placed at the service of a progressive community may actually be our last hope. Sadly, many environmental scientists believe we have passed the point of no return. In other words, it is too late to correct our mistakes merely by going green. Perhaps we need a new progressive ecovision that merges a green spirit with a silicon brain.